What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

2009-12-10 14:42:30

I've sorted the links by name, alphabetically. This is pursuant to discussion here. I've included both a single-choice and a multiple-choice poll because considering many pieces of software to be user-friendly is a valid response. Sorry I could not include all the options, there's a limit of 10.

What qualities do the software you consider to be "user-friendly" have that the others lack that gives them the edge?

I really have to face the music: I am a foobar2000 fanboy. To me, there is no software that compares. The one place where foobar2000 is not user-friendly is in configuration. However, this is irrelevant to me, because configuration is complicated regardless of the software you choose to use.

foobar2000 makes everything easy, and after being configured once, allows immediate access to a whole slew of features, from conversion, to ReplayGain, to secure ripping, to tagging, to moving. All of these are quick, efficient, and streamlined. It's the fastest way to work with my music. The speed at which it works is directly related to its ease-of-use. The Properties dialog, where all the usual tagging happens, is the best solution I have ever seen to the difficult problem of mass-tagging. Sure there are features that will grab metadata from elsewhere, but none of them come without caveats.

It has proven its ease-of-use and user-friendliness over the years, as I introduce new people to it and watch them clue in to both how powerful it is and how natural it is. The focus of foobar2000 has always been significantly on the UI. Initially, it was simply that the UI was Win32 as opposed to the abortions that were skinned players at the time. Even as a simple noisy notepad, however, foobar2000 has had the power to make the user-experience simple and effective.

On top of all of the simple features, foobar2000 offers a huge library of more complicated technical features. However, you don't need to even look at the technical features.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

Not your fault, but as you probably realized difficult questions. a) I don't know any mentioned audio player b) what is "user friendly" (ok, something personal) c) we're at fb2k's home d) people tend to answer this question: "what's your favourite player".

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I know that b) is subjective. I know that due to c) there will be a large foobar2000 factionist vote. And I'm hoping that some people will be able to overcome their intrinsic bias for d) to vote honestly.

From what I gather on the other discussion, there are some foobar2000 users that would vote against foobar2000 here, which should help solve d).

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

Meh, a poll. I was afraid it would appear, as it would be skewed because fb2k official forum is hosted here on HydrogenAudio, or that fact would at least always provide good excuses for others, or start useless registration spree only to cast a vote for someone's favourite player... So here goes my null vote

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I'm hoping the multiple-choice vote will offset that somewhat, and we can disregard the foobar2000 option to get a reasonably unskewed perspective from the multi-choice poll. That was my intent with it anyhow.

The selection bias is towards foobar2000, there's no question, but there's bias everywhere... There will also be pro-Winamp/MediaMonkey bias here and anti-iTunes bias, simply due to the general perspectives of a lot of people in this forum.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I voted for winamp as most user-friendly. And for foobar and winamp for user-friendly. Winamp plays about everything, even videos easily. Support of most file formats makes it most user friendly to me (opposite of itunes ). Too bad it's getting a bit bloated though, fortunately you can turn most bloat off.

I use foobar myself, but i don't consider it to be user friendly. I really like how you can customize it, but you really need to put some effort into it to make it the way you want it. I still don't know how i can auto-update my playlists...doh

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I would consider all players 'user friendly' if all what you want is to download, install, play.Once past that I'd say that foobar should not even be in the poll, it's far from friendly. Solve the fan vote issue too.J. River is not friendly, too many options and different places and ways to configure them.

BTW- I use J.River and foobar, they just don't pass the "My sister wants to play music" test.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

actually, being a long-time iTunes user, I had to vote for it as the most user-friendly audio player... call me crazy, but it's done a great job at managing my music librar(y,ies) and other content for going on 7yrs, and it supports all the formats I need it to (for the moment, at least, though I'd eventually like to see native FLAC support come to OS X/iTunes).

as for which audio players I consider user-friendly, I voted for Winamp, foobar2000 (which to me comes in close second to iTunes), Amarok (based on what little experience I've had with it), and iTunes (which has my ideal UI, very straightforward and easy to use)... Windows Media Player is a chore to set up, but once that is out of the way, I'd also consider it reasonably user-friendly.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I gave a null vote. I've been using Winamp and foobar for years now and I somehow managed to tell them to do what I want them to do. Nothing fancy though, only some moved frame borders and some checkmarks in the prefs. Never tried any other players, because there was no need to and it would only clog up my computer. Therefore no recommendation from me...

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I know that b) is subjective. I know that due to c) there will be a large foobar2000 factionist vote. And I'm hoping that some people will be able to overcome their intrinsic bias for d) to vote honestly.

I know not many players. WMP, fb2k, Winamp (used it for a long time) and VLC. OK VLC is not purely audio. I've seen Amarok but it couldn't compete against, maybe Winamp. I only voted for Winamp. I think an average user wants some kind of tape deck simulation with knobs and such, and probably some fx eye candy. Not what fb2k is targeted at.

I'm not sure about WMP. To me, it is totally confusing. I always found myself searching for menu entries and functionality. But I have no idea how the "average user" (whoever that is) feels about WMP. Windows people use it because it's there, but is there love for it? Don't care.

The answer on "what is a squeller user friendly software" is: fb2k is perfectly alright. Has almost all I want. That is playback and customizable organization of huge amounts of data.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

foobar2000 makes everything easy, and after being configured once, allows immediate access to a whole slew of features, from conversion, to ReplayGain, to secure ripping, to tagging, to moving.

I think you are confusing the term "friendly". Usually a person with whom anybody can get along with easily is called friendly. In contrast a person that is generally grumpy to everyone except those, who have established friendship with him ("configured once"), is usually not specifically called friendly, although maybe even being totally capable of sustaining great, long-lasting friendships in principle.

So no, Foobar is not user-friendly! iTunes is, and somewhat Winamp, but not Foobar, not even close! It's still the most flexible of the bunch, once configured it can do whatever you want and easily. But I would never call it friendly. That's no big deal, I wouldn't call my best friends necessarily friendly (to everyone), either...

iTunes can suck, if your tracks aren't tidily tagged, also if you have been socialized with "directory-structure-thinking". But even my grandfather intuitively gets along with iTunes easily. Out of ~20000 songs he finds the Mozart track he is looking for in less than 100ms by just typing "moz" in a prominently placed, large field called "Search". Browsing by artist, album, or genre is also easy. The default settings are sufficient, just drag and drop additional tracks or insert a CD. iTunes will manage your collection. That's friendly!

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I suspect most of my peers believe I think like an alien, so I'm not voting. But given that I love fb2k, lots of others here love fb2k, and the fb2k logo is an alien.. maybe more of us should be abstaining.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I often use the word "userfriendly" so that i should exactly know what it means. However i feel the difficulty to give an good definition. Is WMP more userfriendly than foobar2000 just because the user doesn't have to learn Titleformatting or is foobar2000 more userfriendly because you will never watch your library in WMP sorted by f.e. lyricist/year/artist? If you then take a look at Helium Music Manager you will see more than 32 views in the library that will suit the needs of most users and that also can be modified in the preferences without any usage of a language . Does that mean HMM is the most userfriendly program of the three? After all you must acknowledge that foobar doesn't force you to use complex title formatting: the album list comes out of box with some views and for the most views you really don't need more than some knowledge about some simple conditional and string functions. So is foobar2000 the winner regarding userfriendlieness?

I gave up to decide wich player at the whole is the most userfriendly one. Nevertheless, it could make sense just to compare parts of the players with correspondending functionality in other players. When i compare the "Automatically fill values" window with correspondending parts of Media Monkey, HMM or JRiver so this little window is a good exemplar for userfriendlieness: it is so simple to use and you don't have to think several hours until you completely understand how it operates - nonetheless it is more powerful than the same tools in other programs. On the other side: Compare foobar2000s query syntax with HMMs graphical query editor - it is more fun to use the latter one. I would say that this the most important criterion: not to get headache to learn how something works and why it works in its special way. ( By the way: in that sense the tagging program "the godfather" is the most horrible program at all)

Let me illustrate that with some arbitrary examples in HMM and foobar:

Userfriendlieness in HMM

You have powerful features like the Music Information Browser and the Artist Relations wich can be used in an intuitive way. You won't need a tutorial to learn how to edit artist relations wich can be defined manually, by library content or by fetching data from dicogs/last.fm - you will just do it.

The main parts of the player (playlist browser, library, album browser, artist browser, music information browser, search) are quickly to find and reachable.

In the latest version the context menu command got a more logical arrangement.

A simple-to-use query editor

Not so userfriendly in HMM

I still have problems to understand how the tag editor works with multiple selections.

Some windows can have three childwindow so that you easily can loose overview.

Userfriendlieness in foobar2000

Removal of unnecessary options in version 0.9 till 1.0b

Believe me or not: my sister as she bought her first computer one year ago decided in favor of foobar2000 and against winamp - she told me that winamp is too complicated.

So many little things like: a big button in album list that tells you to add music to your library and brings you to the right page in preferences.

Sorting, columns, groups and layouts are cluttered and doesn't have a central place. While the sort strings are available in main menu and definable in advanced preferences, the groups and columns are available on rightclick of header in playlist view and definable in an own page in preferences. The layouts on the contrary are available in quick setup window and its definition is the best hidden feature in foobar2000. You may say: so what? - that is your subjective opinion, I would then give an objective criterion: all these four elements are related to list view and are an unity.

Many small things.

To sum it up: I cannot say wich player is the most userfriendly so i didn't vote. For me it is more important to see how each of the players can improve their friendlieness for its users. And all the three player i like (Foobar2000, HMM and JRiver) are improveable

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

Winamp is my primary, Foobar is my secondary (which I only use to rip/transcode, if it was unrestricted free in Winamp, I wouldn't need it). I say this to show I didn't just vote for my favorite, and by the fact that Foobar is currently number 1, shows me that's the case.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I would prefer another title, for example "What's your favorite audio player".I voted for MusicBee, because it has the best musepack chapters suport, but I don't know whether it is the most user-friendly for everybody. It comes preconfigured and you can start use it immediately after installation, but it is not just an audio player (the same goes to the most of the rest BTW ) and this might be too much for somebody.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

Holy Cow! If Foobar is anywhere near user-friendly, I'm much dumber than I thought. I truly wish it was as easy to use as some folks make it seem. I got so frustrated with it that I removed it from my computer. To me user-friendly would mean that you can start using it right away (the basics anyway), then spend a few minutes browsing the help file to comprehend the rest of the features. Everyone on this forum probably has vastly more experience than myself regarding music players. In fact, I've only had a computer for about 7 or 8 years. The first audio player I remember using was called Musicmatch (I think). I was perfectly happy with that until Yahoo came along and screwed it up. So, I then used WMP for a while until I discovered mp3 players and the importance of secure and accurate ripping (I had wondered why some of the CDs I burned had some imperfections, but I just blamed it on the disc). Then I found out about EAC and more recently dBpoweramp. EAC was very difficult to set up for me. I spent at least several weeks of my spare time pouring through Google searches for guides, going to forums like this one and plain old trial and error until I think I have it figured out. dBpoweramp is very simple (user-friendly) and I love it, although I still use EAC on the rare occasions I can't get a perfect rip with dB. Of course, in the course of learning about these rippers I also learned about LAME and FLAC (I'm almost embarrassed to admit I had been using the .wma format because it took up less space and I didn't know any better). So now I have nearly all of my CDs ripped to flac on an external hard drive and used dB Music Converter (also very simple to use) to encode to mp3s on my main HDD for listening to and loading up my portable mp3 players, which leads me (finally) to the topic of this discussion. First I did try FB2K, but at that time I was engrossed in trying to figure out EAC, so I was a bit overwhelmed and ditched it. Next up were Winamp and Media Monkey, both of which I liked and still use. To me Winamp was a little easier to use right off the bat, but as I've gotten used to both of them I am liking Media Monkey more and more (free versions of each). To me, a true newbie, I find those 2 players along with WMP the most simple and straight forward and yes, user-friendly. Currently I'm searching for a free CD burner that I feel comfortable with and is compatible with Vista. I have been using the burners that came with the software for a couple of external drives (Nero and Roxio), which are fine unless you are making a compilation CD from several different albums. I want one that you can level the volume in an uncomplicated way without damaging your mp3 file. After I figure that one out I plan on playing around with foobar some more because it seems like an awesome player in that you can do so much with it if you can master it.

What is the most user-friendly audio player? (2009)

I'm a very happy J. River Media Center user. Since it wasn't included in the poll, I had not yet commented. I'll do so now.

I don't think that the poll question gets at the real question a new PC audio user faces. Ease of use is just one criterion among several potentially important criteria. A player that is easy to use but lacks functionality I need is a non starter for me. A player that I can customize to suit my way of doing things is far less painful for me than one for which I have to contort myself.

The relevant criteria vary for different people. Any new user should experiment with several players before settling on one player. By the time, a user is ready to make a choice, he or she should pick a player that is a good fit and is easy enough to learn to use.